When the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released its most recent data yesterday, a flood of commentaries has, predictably, followed. Getting a simple understanding of what the results were can be hard. This link will help. It will take you to an interactive chart created by Education Week that displays the rank order of the scale scores for each country for both the current release and for 2009. Drop-down fields let you switch between years and subjects. It also provides a color coded range of average, statistically above average and statistically below average. It is easy to use and lets you quickly see the spread among the 42 countries being compared.
In both 2009 and in 2012 the results from the United States place American students squarely in the middle of the countries participating. There has been little movement in US scores over the past two years.
Here is the link to the chart:
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